Devices with speech activated control mechanisms are steadily increasing in popularity. Mobile phones with “voice dial” and speech-activated toys are some of these devices that one can readily find nowadays.
However, such devices usually require pre-programming to associate a voice input with a particular entry (in a mobile phone, the entry is a particular entity's contact number). This can be a tedious process when it involves a large number of entries, such as, for example, in address books and in a collection of media files. This makes such a feature undesirable to a user because of the inconvenience.
There are speech recognition features incorporated in some devices today that do not require pre-programming. However, technology is still not mature enough to be able to overcome the difficulty of recognising heavily accented or mumbled English. In addition, while English is the language of choice for the interconnected global village of this digital age, it is not the only language in use. Populous countries in the world like China and India do not have a predominantly English-speaking populace, and these devices with smart speech recognition features may not be widely adopted in these countries. These huge consumer markets represent lost opportunities for corporations if their needs are not being specifically met.
Such “smart” devices do not have multiple language recognition capabilities at this moment. As such, the makers of such devices are required to make different versions of the same product for markets with language capabilities other than English, and this inadvertently increases the cost of manufacturing each device, since either a dedicated production line/facility is required, or a production line/facility for the English version needs to be modified as and when required to produce the other versions.
It is also a challenge for “smart” devices that have multiple language recognition capabilities to properly manage and administer the different character code sets such as, for example, ASCII for Anglo-alphanumeric based languages, Big-5 for Traditional Chinese, GB for Simplified Chinese, JIS for Japanese and the like.